Personally, my answer to my boss would still be "NO (with an explanation as to why) but I'll be happy to execute any query under direct supervision after I've...

Sorry, I thought I had posted some possible solutions.  I coulda' sworn I posted that and my response to Jeff earlier but it's obviously not here now.  Wish I'd kept...

The DBA would not be in direct control of any genuine audit process.  It's too much of a potential conflict of interest.  Think about it: the company is/may be doing...

Don't know, since we can't see the code.  Just adding ROW_NUMBER() to a query should not increase the number of rows.

Best would be to create the proc so that it runs as "OWNER", if SQL allows you to do that.  Then the auditors wouldn't need separate permissions of their own.

Otherwise,...

Columnstores perform better because they compress data extremely well.

If you a rowstore that's totally uncompressed, the difference will be massive.  If the rowstore is page compressed, at least it has...

Hi ScottPletcher, I have not seriously considered page compression instead of (N)CCI's as not using any columnstores would require us creating B-Tree indexes to keep query performance sane. In...

Thank you for your answers.

The EXEC command returns the same error, I had already tried this.

I don't want to create the object on the second database, cause my query...

EXEC('SELECT * INTO [SecondDatabase].[dbo].[object_name] FROM [FirstServer].FirstDatabase.dbo.object_name') AT [SecondServer]

Don't forget about views: if you prefer that some people see a combined result as a table, you can use a view so they can see it as table, without...

Have you tried PAGE compression rather than going all the way to a columnstore format?

Agreed, you don't need nor want a separate table.

If you're having performance issues with the existing table generating your result using the PIVOT, then let's fix that issue, not create...

I'm with Phil.  Whenever I've seen this error it relates to the DEFAULT db specific for the user (or group).

The indexes could be critical.  Would you be able to post the DDL for the tables and the SQL queries?

SQL 2016 could be a big help in another way, it...

Exactly.  Just this:

SELECT MIN(StartDate) AS MinDate

FROM Schedule

WHERE WorkCenterID = 'LAY-W' AND ScheduleID = '5'